A Few Best Men (and Pavlovas)

This week, we were lucky enough to get tickets to A Few Best Men from Showfilmfirst. I’d seen it promoted a few places and the summary I had going in was “the British equivalent of the Hangover“. Which (with the exception of it actually being the Australian equivalent of the Hangover) was not totally inaccurate. But, the Australian setting does give you some absolutely breath-taking landscapes in Australia’s Blue Mountains, which just makes the film a lot more visually interesting.

The premise is pretty simple: British boy falls in love with Australian girl while on gap year and is moving to Australia in order to marry her. He brings his group of mates with him and hijinks ensue. If you’ve seen The Hangover, you have a fairly good idea of the kind of things which will happen. It’s not a particularly intelligent movie, but if you like gross-out guy buddy comedy, you’ll enjoy this one.

And so, in honour of the beautiful Australian setting, today we will be making pavlovas! (I know, I’m all about the merengues lately! But next time, we’ll move a bit further away).

Once you have your seperated eggs, start beating them. As I’ve said before, this is REALLY not a job for spoon mixing, so do try to use a hand mixer if at all possible. Once you’ve been mixing for several minutes, start adding in the caster sugar, several tablespoons at a time.

Once the sugar has been added and the merengue has reached the point where it begins to form soft peaks, add in the cornflour, vanilla and white wine vinegar

Once it’s ready, heat the oven to 180C. Once the pavlova is ready to be placed in, turn the oven down to 120C and put the pavlova in. It’s going to need to bake for an hour and a half and once it finishes, you need to turn off the oven and leave the pavlova in, allowing it to cool gradually (preventing cracks.) Ideally, you would do this overnight!

Once it’s cooled, it should be topped with cream and the berry of your choice (for me, strawberry. Always strawberry!)